I'm a 0x24 years old French geek. I'm a software engineer
in the embedded field with a background in industrial
automation and electronics among other things. A GNU/Linux user since 97 I
think, heavily since 99, mainly since 2000.

During the summer of 2001, I looked for an embedded target
to play with. My goals were:

to explore a classic but non-Intel architecture (my job
involve Intel's CPU at a very low, architecture dependant
level),

to experiment GNU and OSS tools in an embedded
development context, after a few interesting experiments
with Linux kernel driver and RTLinux modules.

I chose a German made Motorola 68K board, the NF300.
Designed in an academic setting for
pedagogical purposes, it offered the ubiquitous and GNU-
supported 68K/CPU32 architecture with a good level of
hardware documentation for a reasonable price. It also
offers quite a few peripherals to play with without
bothering adding custom-made hardware.

I started scanning through the whole NF300 and Motorola
documentation, played first with the delivered DOS tools,
then build a cross-GCC tool chain from scratch on Linux and
its BDM cross-debugger and... And then time passed but I
still didn't have a realistic but challenging project to
actually do something out of it.

In the meantime my brother Gregoire became
interested and this little board with the flashing LED
sitting across my monitor. Working as a research engineer
for the French National Geographic Institute, he's a geek
too but in the scientific computing field. Dominique, a
friend since 0x0f years was quite curious too. Dominique
comes from electronic and happens to be good at mechanics
too (though he would deny it) and yes, he can be described
as a geek too.

The three of us shared common interests and curiosity for
each other's knowledge, and started to think of building
something together. In the winter of 2001, we saw a small
robotic competition. That was it. A robot. We could do one.
We (are supposed to) have the skills.

We wanted to have a "bill of contract for it".
Requirements, deadline. We wanted rules, to have a clear
goal and motivation. We needed a competition to provide
these rules.

I started to look for robot competitions in France or near
Europe, and quickly realized (without much surprised) that
there weren't much, and worse they were all for
students. We are not students. Sorry, not much we
can do about that. The more interesting competition by far
was the two competitions organized by the ANSTJ
(Association Nationale Sciences et Techniques Jeunesse =
Youth Science and Technical non-profit Organization): the
Coupe de
France de Robotique (in French) and the Eurobot . These are in fact one contest in two, a
national and a European, sharing the same rules. I
contacted the organizing ANSTJ and was informed that,
though not automatically guaranteed, non-students teams
could possibly compete, depending among other
things on their input to the general and technical mood of
the thing.

The project was
launched. I chose "botzilla" as its name
(though there are tons of *zillas out there that's a fun
and easy to remember name).